[felixgallo]

With all due respect, I'm afraid you're addressing a series of unrelated points and indulging, hopefully unintentionally, in a rhetorical smokescreen, which includes editing your original post to hide an important topic.

I'm aware of what systemd claims to be. I'm aware of the benefits that its fans claim it, and it alone has.

My criticism is not with the Linux kernel (!?!) or user namespacing as a concept. My criticism is that systemd takes all of the rich complexity of user namespacing and, in response, adds the flag 'PrivateUsers=yes' -- a boolean. That's not what user namespacing is for and now we have two problems: systemd, which has no business making that decision and has done it the wrong way, and the continuing need, which has not been solved by a boolean flag, for daemons to have competent, complex user namespaces. Now devs have to know both ways: the half-assed way, and the real way, instead of just having a tool that gives them the real way.

That's what we in the software design business call a shitty design that would make Guy Fieri blush. But I guess we're all in Flavortown now.